Biden says he'll ban TikTok if Congress passes bill, but he's campaigning on it until then
Biden says he'll ban TikTok if Congress passes bill, but he's campaigning on it until then
President Joe Biden's election campaign is active on TikTok at the same time lawmakers are urging ByteDance to divest the app or to ban it.
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Quick outline of why TikTok is so uniquely dangerous:
- The Chinese government treats communication networks as their personal hoovering-attachment for any data they might want. Companies are required by law to operate as an arm of Chinese intelligence, both in terms of giving information and in terms of manipulating what information people on their network are allowed to see.
- It's not just your TikTok data. It's photos and files on your phone, your contacts, your messages, basically anything that the app with its too-permissive permissions can get its hands on, can potentially go up to Chinese intelligence.
- TikTok is not structured like any other app. It has features like custom-downloading and running arbitrary binaries from its central server that honestly don't even make much sense except as spying apparatus (consistent with #1).
- What China might do with this unprecedented level of access to everyone's phones is malevolent in a different way than, say, Facebook's access to everyone's data. Like Facebook they have the ability to e.g. influence an election, but they also have the ability to try to blackmail an individual to compromise them, or do for-real torture in the real world (say by tracking down a dissident via TikTok spying and then having one of their little Chinese-police-in-America units grab them).
Basically I don't think any government should have that kind of access to access people's private communications or design the algorithms that dictate people's social media experience, but definitely not China's in particular.
The only valid criticism to this move I've seen and actually agree with is that instead of banning individual companies, the US should enact legislation that makes these practices illegal.
NSA raises its hand
"No we would prefer that you didn't"
(I mean, honestly, it's a good point. Making a company-neutral law would be a better approach for 3 or 4 different big reasons.)
Which would, of course, make Facebook illegal as well, and LinkedIn... and pretty much all of Alphabet.
... and that sounds fine to me.
yeah but then they would have to ban facebook and instagram too.
they do all of these if you replace 'china' with 'united states'
The most baffling thing to me about that whole "data buying scandal" is that the government was PAYING for it and not just seizing it saying "yeah you're giving us that, here's a gag order so you cant talk about it"
Sources on any of this? Perhaps it works differently on Android.
The main thing which you miss though is that it has “the algorithm” down pat. While it knows I’ll watch cooking videos and videos of people yelling at cops, it doesn’t bother trying to show me things about Trump, etc. it is keeping me in my own custom echo chamber. I have no idea how it works so well.
Now imagine someone hell bent on believing things like the pizza molester stories or Jan 6th alt histories. This is a very effective tool for radicalizing people and reinforcing the “truth” they already suspect. It’s easier to divide people based on preconceived notions than trying to convince people of something new.
Sources:
- https://thehill.com/opinion/cybersecurity/532583-for-chinese-firms-theft-of-your-data-is-now-a-legal-requirement/
- https://www.proofpoint.com/us/blog/threat-protection/understanding-information-tiktok-gathers-and-stores
- https://www.currentware.com/blog/block-tiktok/
- https://www.businessinsider.com/china-hong-kong-spy-agency-official-presence-national-security-laws-report-2020-6 https://www.npr.org/2023/04/17/1170571626/fbi-arrests-2-on-charges-tied-to-chinese-outpost-in-new-york-city
While I agree that the fingerprinting data is interesting, on iOS, TikTok doesn’t require any of those permissions as indicated. Some of the articles state that they are required, but they aren’t. As far as I know it isn’t possible, without a zero day of some sort, to access camera, sound, contacts, etc without explicitly granting those permissions.
That said, that is a lot of data, and for those that can be linked back to an individual. And I’m sure most people are less careful with permissions. The fingerprinting data is clearly powerful, and I find it extremely fascinating, since there is VERY limited input and such effective output.
I don’t believe 3 is possible on iOS? Arbitrary code execution is something Apple explicitly disallows on the App Store. While some apps sneak through, something as large as TikTok likely wouldn’t survive long with blatant rule breaking.
The time I saw it, the researcher said specifically that they'd observed it on Android. Whether that means that that feature of TikTok is only an Android thing because of the feature you're talking about, I don't know, but that would make some kind of sense yes.
facebook and instagram do all of these if you replace 'china' with 'us'